Jim Henson: The Biography

by Brian Jay Jones

  In Juhl’s first treatment, Kermit allows Gonzo to write and direct a bad adventure movie called Into the Jaws of the Demons of Death—with “this cheesy, terrible plot,” as Juhl put it, “that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, about something being stolen that led to a chase around the world.” In his enthusiasm, Gonzo spends his entire budget on an impressive opening credits sequence, then has no money left for the rest of the film. As the movie proceeds, the film quality gets worse and worse, eventually eroding into black-and-white Super 8 film, then a slide show, and finally just storyboards—until Gonzo sells out to corporate sponsors and finishes the movie in a beautiful, high-definition, widescreen format.

  Jim was delighted with the treatment, and put Juhl to work writing a full script, which he turned in as Jim was wrapping up A Muppet Family Christmas in Ontario. Jim, Juhl, and Oz passed the script back and forth, and even Oz—always prickly about the treatment of the characters—thought it was an exciting project. “It’s going to be the kind of movie the audience wants the Muppets to do,” he told Jim. “Just a little crazy and a whole lot of fun.” As it was written, The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made actually wouldn’t be cheap to make—Juhl’s script called for erupting volcanoes and exploding islands, and for Meryl Streep to play Miss Piggy’s stand-in—but the idea was funny and Jim thought he could manage things on a budget of $8 million. He and Juhl would keep playing with it.

  That autumn, Jim fl ew to Los Angeles to make an appearance with Kermit on a Dolly Parton television special on October 21—but more important, he would be meeting the next day with Tartikoff and NBC executives to make the pitch for The Jim Henson Hour. Besides the pitch reel, Jim brought with him a densely written proposal—unlike many of his proposals, this one had no illustrations—behind a cover with a sharply designed JIM HENSON HOUR logo, featuring Jim’s signature prominently tilted across the page in bright Kermit green. Jim leapt into his pitch with gusto, touting The Jim Henson Hour as “a rich and mysterious, wonderfully imaginative hour … for the whole family to enjoy,” and which put “the best of everything” he did in one complete package. The executives listened intently, and Tartikoff promised to get back to Jim soon.

  What Jim was hoping he had conveyed to the network, perhaps more than anything else, was just how much he still loved and believed in television. While he had branched out into movies over the last decade, television was still his artistic and creative oasis. It was the medium he knew and understood the best—and it was a medium he still thought could do much for the common good. “We should be creating a kind of basis for TV which will be good for us and for kids,” Jim said. “There’s too much negative thinking in the world. Why don’t we try dealing with the happier side instead?”

  He would expand on those views a month later in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd gathered in Los Angeles to honor him as an inductee to the Television Hall of Fame. Jim had “mixed feelings” about being singled out for the award, which honored “persons who have made outstanding contributions in the arts, sciences or management of television.” “I like working collaboratively with people,” he once said. “I have a terrific group of people who work with me, and think of the work that we do as ‘our’ work.” Nonetheless, he knew the award was “certainly an honor”—plus he was being recognized alongside several performers he admired, including Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, and the late Ernie Kovacs. Jim gamely accepted his Hall of Fame award on November 15, but his speech that evening said much about how he regarded his work, his colleagues, and his responsibilities to the common good:

  All the work that I do in television is very much a group effort. It’s a lot of us that do this. It’s these talented people that make it possible for me to do the things that give me the credit for doing a lot of good stuff on television, and I would really like to thank those people. Television is already one of the most powerful influences on our culture, but because it is so powerful, there’s a great deal of responsibility that goes with that. And I think those of us that make programs, particularly for children, have to be aware of what we’re putting out there. I think this is what is fun for me, and why I am very grateful for this very special honor … it makes my work—or rather my fun—so gratifying.

  Finally, in the third week of December 1987 came the news Jim had been waiting for: NBC had agreed to produce a half season of weekly episodes of The Jim Henson Hour, to begin airing in January 1989, a little over a year away. “It’s very exciting,” wrote Jim in a memo to the entire Henson Associates staff, “but a bit scary because there is so much to do.” Beneath the enthusiasm, however, was a slight annoyance: as a condition of its approval, NBC had insisted on major changes to the show’s format. While Tartikoff had told Jim from the outset that he could rotate among the four themed hours one after another, just as Jim had proposed, NBC executives had pushed back against that approach. Instead of a comprehensive, themed hour, the network insisted on two fifteen-minute sections for the first half hour—made up of Muppet moments, short Lead-Free TV bits, or other skits—while the second half hour would be one long piece, such as an installment of The Storyteller or another original feature.

  There were still some visible remnants of the original proposal; once a month, Jim could produce an hour-long special, such as a Storyteller or one of his “Next Wave” projects, like the Sesame Street twentieth-anniversary show he was still hoping to produce, or a proposed hour-long musical special featuring the Electric Mayhem in Mexico. For the most part, however, NBC had taken the unique ingredients Jim had provided in his original proposal and asked him to blend them together into a garbled chop suey. Jim tried to put the best face on it, eventually explaining publicly that it had been a mutual decision. “We were working on Storyteller and coming up with a concept for a very electronic variety show,” Jim told the Austin American-Statesman later. “And we also had a series of specials we were putting together. So, we came to NBC with this concept of putting all these things into one show. We thought it’d be nice to kind of pull it all together.” Nothing about that statement was necessarily untrue, but it didn’t accurately reflect Jim’s more cohesive starting point.

  Still, it wasn’t like Jim to complain; he was pleased to at last have a spot secured in the NBC lineup, and for now that was enough. Now he had a year to “pull it all together.” Doing so, however, would prove tougher to do than Jim had ever imagined.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A KIND OF CRAZINESS

  1987–1989

  Jim and the Muppet cast of the ill-fated Jim Henson Hour (1989). “Most things didn’t work on that show,” said Jerry Juhl. “It was a huge frustration and a great sadness.” (photo credit 14.1)

  AS 1988 BEGAN, JIM PUT HIS WRITERS TO WORK BRAINSTORMING AND writing short pieces to fill the first half hour of the newly reformatted Jim Henson Hour. “[I was] in a meeting with NBC yesterday,” Jim told his team in late January, “[and] they seemed to be quite happy with the direction this is all going.” At the moment, however, even Jim wasn’t quite sure what direction that might be. Jim still believed the Lead-Free TV concept was an ideal format for satirizing cable television, but the writing remained a problem—he had already rejected a similar concept called Pirate TV for being too “nasty.” He also insisted that the Muppet segments be somewhat educational, and proposed skits in which the Muppets somehow explained the federal debt, the ozone, or the legislative process.

  Coming up with features for the second half hour was a bit easier, and a lot more fun. Besides The Storyteller, Jim was thinking about an origin storytelling of the discovery of Fraggle Rock called The Saga of Fraggle Rock. There was also Inside John, another variation on Jim’s Limbo concept, in which the various parts of a seventeen-year-old boy’s brain try to wrest control of him throughout a typical day. And then there were proposed stories of enchanted bowling balls, extraterrestrial mailmen, and adaptations of Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time or the works of A. A. Milne, as well as an ambitious
outline for a show called ASTRO G.N.E.W.T.S. that blended puppets with animation, computer graphics, and video effects. All would be false starts, but ideas, as always, were never a problem.

  And then there was the question of the “home base” for the series, the room or set from which Jim would host the show. Figuring out where a show was located was always a problem for Jim; he had misfired with the vague sets in his two early Muppet Show pilots before finally getting it right on The Muppet Show itself. The Jim Henson Hour’s pitch reel had been set in a faux Muppet workshop—still the best idea—but he wasn’t happy with the look or feel of that, either; he wanted something more dynamic and high-tech—and ideally, he wanted something computer-generated.

  Typically, even as he struggled to find some sort of structure for The Jim Henson Hour—which, given its current amorphous state, should probably have been his priority—Jim had decided to speed up production on yet another project, a film based on Roald Dahl’s 1983 children’s book The Witches, which Jim had decided to executive-produce. It was a project he’d had simmering on the back burner, under the watchful eye of Duncan Kenworthy, for more than a year—and it had been a problem almost from day one, due largely to the involvement of the highly irritable, seventy-one-year-old Dahl. Jim and Dahl had gotten off to a bad start, with Henson Associates’ and Dahl’s lawyers squabbling over the costs of optioning the book for film. “I don’t like this,” Dahl had sulked to Jim. “If there is going to be any ill-feeling, I would rather the film was not made.” Jim had done his best to smooth things over, promising the writer that while there had been some problems with financing, it was “for very valid reasons, and it shouldn’t become personal.” “It is one of my favorite projects in a long time,” Jim assured Dahl, “and I’m going to try very hard to produce a film which we can all be proud of.”

  The Witches would be another opportunity for Jim to rally the Creature Shop into action—always one of his favorite sandboxes in which to play. To direct, Jim had lined up Nicolas Roeg, the edgy and somewhat unpredictable English director of eclectic films like The Man Who Fell to Earth. Jim had initially recruited Roeg as a director for The Storyteller before offering him The Witches—a job Roeg was delighted to accept—but Roeg, too, would eventually become antagonistic, caught between Jim’s and Dahl’s creative whirlwinds and grousing about executive interference. Dahl was also unimpressed with Roeg. “I will tell you I was devastated when I learned you were not directing it yourself,” Dahl wrote to Jim.

  Pricklier than Dahl or Roeg, however, were the witches themselves. Wiccans across the country—already smarting over Dahl’s book for what they considered its negative portrayal of witches—admonished Jim in a letter-writing campaign when they learned he was adapting the book for the big screen. Jim tried to appease their concerns, but only got caught up arguing semantics over the terms “black magic” or “evil witch” with the head of the Witches’ League for Public Awareness, based in Salem, Massachusetts. Finally, Jim simply pleaded for patience. “While I am not an advocate of any one religion, I feel close to many of the concepts of the Wicca way of thinking,” he wrote, “and for these reasons, I will try not to do anything that will harm any of you.”

  By late January, Jim had an agreement for The Witches in place with Lorimar, where Bernie Brillstein had recently been installed as CEO of the film division, and in early February had dinner with Anjelica Huston and secured her as his leading lady—a decision, for once, that Dahl was happy with. He would not stay happy for long.

  At the same time, Jim had his own unhappy news to deal with: The Storyteller was doomed. After three installments, the show remained a critical darling, but a ratings disaster—and NBC’s confidence in the show was rapidly eroding. After some discussion with the network, Jim decided to hold on to the two unaired episodes of the series, and scrapped plans to expand The Storyteller into one-hour installments. “NBC is worried about the appeal of the show,” Jim wrote in a memo to the entire Henson Associates staff. “I am not worried about this, but I don’t mind dropping the [planned one-hour episodes] at this point. We’ll do something else instead.” Despite the best face, he was more disappointed than he let on. “I think they’re the best television shows ever made,” he confided to The Washington Post.

  While he understood NBC’s impatience—gone were the days when a series like The Muppet Show could be given breathing room to find its way—he was certain there was still a place for television shows that took their time and rewarded patient viewers with high production values and top-notch storytelling. Jim, in fact, was among the first to realize that cable television—with its niche channels and willing, paying audience—was an ideal market for original, made-for-cable films. “When the cable is hooked up to enough homes,” mused Jim, “then we’ll be able to make films just for the video and the cable market. Certainly, that will come.” But, he hastened to add, without high-definition picture quality and the capability to show films in a widescreen format, it was still “so much more interesting” to work on feature films. Once again, Jim had seen the potential in a new technology, even if the technology itself hadn’t yet caught up with his plans for it.

  Even with NBC’s lack of faith, Jim still had enough confidence in The Storyteller to put into production the remaining four episodes NBC had approved, with the intention of marketing them internationally and using them for The Jim Henson Hour. In late February, he went back to Elstree to spend a week directing an installment of The Storyteller called “The Heartless Giant,” a bittersweet story of friendship—and betrayal—in which a young prince frees an imprisoned, heartless giant, then becomes his servant to help him find his missing heart. “I love working on this show,” Jim told his staff—and he also loved the underlying morality of the old folktales, which fell directly in line with his own views of the common good. “In broad strokes,” explained Jim, “the message I try to bring across is the positives of life and a positive attitude toward the goodness of mankind.”

  After completing his episode of The Storyteller, Jim headed for France to meet with Jerry Juhl and Larry Mirkin and have a frank conversation about The Jim Henson Hour—and to spend a few days with Mary Ann at the swank L’Hôtel in Paris.

  The daytime hours were for work. Juhl and the writing team—mainly Mirkin and Jocelyn Stevenson—were still frustrated by the dilemma NBC had created by insisting on jumbling together all four elements of Jim’s initial proposal. Juhl thought he understood what NBC was getting at—“The Disney Hour [sic] consisted of a lot of things Walt Disney thought were worthy of him and his audience [and] that’s what this is,” explained Juhl—but the scattered format remained a problem. Jim was confident they could hold the fragments of the show together by putting Kermit—the reliable eye of the Muppet hurricane—in a television control room, overseeing things much as he had done on The Muppet Show. On the technical side, Jim thought hiring a regular director to preside over the look and feel of the series might also give the show a more cohesive structure, and picked through a list of suggestions that included Sam Raimi—whom Lisa Henson was dating at the time—and Brad Bird before finally deciding on former Muppet Show director Peter Harris. Jim pronounced himself “delighted” with the involvement of Harris. “I’m feeling quite good about the show,” Jim said.

  The rest of the time in Paris was devoted to romping with Mary Ann, goofily posing for pictures for each other, gazing at the scenery (“Isn’t this a romantic view?” Jim would say dreamily), and frolicking in bed in their exclusive Parisian hotel. Jim loved being giddily in love—and now, in Mary Ann, it seemed he had found a sexual warmth and an intimacy that he had long been missing. Nineteen years Jim’s junior, Mary Ann made him feel younger and more vibrant—and some thought Jim had intentionally sought out such reassurance. Turning fifty had been hard for him—and now at fifty-one, he was starting to feel his age. His feet, already aching from the years of standing to perform, had grown increasingly stiff and sore—finding the most comfortable shoe had lat
ely become something of a Grail-type quest. His teeth also bothered him constantly, and, more upsetting, he’d developed a slight tremor in his hands—an affliction that had also plagued his father, but which was particularly worrisome for a puppeteer.

  Mary Ann, then, was just the kind of willing partner he wanted and needed in his adventures, both inside the bedroom and beyond. Mary Ann dove eagerly into Jim’s noisy exploits right along with him, whether it was swimming, yachting, horseback riding, or taking the kind of long hikes Jim loved. For her part, Mary Ann would later take him to his first nude beach in Palm Beach—an experience, she said, that made Jim almost giddy with joy—indulge his tastes for caviar and kir, or tease him gently about his hair, encouraging him to brush it back from his forehead or wear it in a tight ponytail.

  “I think he was very much in love,” said Richard Hunt. “Jim was a romancer.… It wasn’t just some fling.” Heather Henson—who perhaps more than any of the Henson children had observed firsthand her parents’ relationship and Jim’s dating habits—thought Mary Ann was good for her father as well. “I was really quite fond of her,” said Heather. “By the time Mary Ann came around, I was actually happy to have him seeing someone stable.” It was Jim’s first real relationship since his legal separation from Jane, and while he had always enjoyed the company and the aesthetics of beautiful women, he was now in a committed relationship with one … or at least as committed as Jim could be. “I don’t think he ever wanted to marry anybody else,” said Brian Henson. “Besides,” he added, “if you’re not divorced from your last wife, you can never get married again.”